What charmed me was its funky, imperfect sound… not that it wasn’t in tune… but I felt that as if I lifted the top of the piano and peered in, I’d see its insides heaving with sound, its old hammers compressed and grooved from hitting the strings millions of times, the strings themselves fatigued with age, the tuning pins loosening. This one at McNeill Bay was painted by Gillian Redwood, and she calls it “The Salish Sea.” The piano and others painted by local artists were deployed around Oak Bay as part of the Arts Alive program. Some surprising thing will happen that you would’ve missed if you’d just driven on by. You never know what you’re going to see, I often say as we park someplace to get out and look. It’s a relatively small peninsula with an oceanside road that winds through the neighborhoods of James Bay and Oak Bay, and we took the drive-stopping here and there to take photos and soak up the glorious weather. And boy, did we know it.ĭriving around the south shore of Vancouver Island is one of our favorite things to do. Nothing like a crisis to remind you of how lucky you are. I remember walking around thinking, “It might have been otherwise,” which is the repeated line in a lovely poem by the late Jane Kenyon. So coming back to Victoria-a place we love and have spent parts of summers since 1999-in July 2019 felt a bit miraculous, too.
#Piano tuner oahu series
That began a series of miracles and lifesavers who put Dick back together again, resulting in a triple bypass at Kaiser Moanalua Medical Center in Honolulu and two of his oldest and dearest friends who came to Oahu to care for him when I had to return home. As I’ve written about elsewhere (you can look at the whole series, Dick’s Great Heart Adventure), Dick’s heart stopped and was restarted after a few minutes thanks to a team of strangers who came to the rescue and the swift application of an AED (automated external defibrillator) that brought him back to life with one massive shock. Six months earlier in January, Dick had collapsed in cardiac arrest as we were about to board a plane in Honolulu to return home after a two-week vacation.
The last time we were in Victoria, B.C., three summers ago-before, as they sing in “Hamilton,” “the world turned upside down”-it was July 2019, and Dick and I were marveling over our good fortune. The seaside piano at Beach and Oliver streets, Oak Bay, Victoria, B.C.
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